John Berger - Here Is Where We Meet

Archives are different from book libraries. Libraries are made up of bound volumes, whose every page has been repeatedly reread and corrected. Archives often consist of papers which were originally abandoned or laid aside. Genève’s passion is for discovering, cataloguing and checking what has been laid aside. No wonder she’s short-sighted. No wonder she arms herself — even when asleep — against pity.

For example, how to catalogue a small page torn from a desk calendar, covering the two weeks from Sunday 22 September to Saturday 5 October in the year 1935? In the small space for notes, between the columns of the two weeks, are written eleven words. The handwriting is sloping and quick and unconsidered. Perhaps a woman’s. The words, in English, are: all night, all night and what is it on a postcard.

What does Genève’s passion bring her? It assuages her insatiable curiosity. A curiosity which has nothing — or very little — to do with inquisitiveness or gossip. She is neither concierge, nor judge. Genève is an observer, fascinated by the sheer variety of human predicaments and consolations.

Confronted with any situation, however outrageous, she is capable of muttering ’I know’ and then of adding gently: Sit there, I’ll see what I can bring you.

Impossible to guess whether what she will bring will come from a bookshelf, a medicine chest, a cellar, a wardrobe or the drawer of her bedside table. And strangely, it is this question about the provenance of what she will bring that makes her sexy.

When he was seventeen, Borges had an experience in Genève which marked him deeply. He only spoke about it much later to one or two friends. His father had decided it was high time his son lost his virginity. Accordingly he arranged an appointment for him with a prostitute. A bedroom on a second floor. A late spring afternoon. Near to where the family lived. Perhaps in the Place du Bourg-de-Four, perhaps in the Rue du Général-Dufour. Borges may have confused the two names. I would opt for the Rue du Général-Dufour because it is an archive street.

Face to face with the prostitute, the seventeen-year-old Borges was paralysed by shyness, shame and the suspicion that his father was a client of the same woman. Throughout his life his own body distressed him. He undressed only in poems, which, at the same time, were his clothes.

When the woman noticed the young man’s distress, that afternoon in the Rue du Général-Dufour, she threw a peignoir over her white shoulders and, stooping slightly, walked over towards the door.

Sit there, she said gently. I’ll see what I can bring you.

What she brought was something she found in one of the archives.

Many years later, when Borges was the Director of the National Library in Buenos Aires, his imagination became the tireless collector of put-aside objects, torn telltale notes, mislaid fragments. His great poetic oeuvre is a kind of catalogue of the items of such a collection: some man’s memory of a woman who left him thirty years ago, a ring of keys, a deck of cards, a withered violet crushed between the pages of a book, the mirrored letter on a blotting paper, a fallen volume hidden from sight by the other volumes, a symmetric rose in a boy’s kaleidoscope, the colours of a Turner when the lights are turned out in the narrow gallery, fingernails, atlases, a moustache greying at the ends, the oars of Argus. .

Sit there, I’ll see what I can bring you.

Last summer while Bush and his army and the petrol corporations and their advisors were ruining Iraq, I had a rendezvous in Genève with my daughter, Katya. I had told Katya about the encounter with my mother in Lisboa. When my mother was alive she and Katya had an understanding, for they shared something quite deep, which they didn’t have to discuss. Both agreed that to find any sense in life it was pointless to search in the places where people were instructed to look. Sense was only to be found in secrets.

After listening to the story of what happened in Lisboa, Katya proposed: Your courtesy can begin with Borges! Why not? You quote him, we discuss him, we’ve often talked about visiting the cemetery, and you never have, let’s go together!

She was working in the Grand Théâtre de Genève, so I drove there to pick her up. As soon as I switched off the engine and put my feet down, the heat was stifling. I pulled off my gloves. There was almost no traffic. Everyone in the city centre leaves in high summer. The few pedestrians, mostly elderly, had the assured slow rhythm of sleepwalkers. They preferred to be outside rather than in their apartments, for such heat is even more oppressive when you face it alone. They meandered, they sat, they fanned themselves, and they licked ice creams or ate apricots. (It was the best summer for apricots for a decade.)

I took off my helmet and stuffed my gloves into it.

Motorbikers wear light leather gloves even on the hottest summer days for a special reason. Nominally gloves are for protection in case of a fall, and to isolate the hands from the sticky rubber of the grips. More intimately, however, they shield the hands from the cool air-rush which, although highly agreeable in the heat, blunts the sensitivity of touch. Riders wear summer gloves on their hands for the pleasure of precision.

I went to the stage door and asked for Katya. The receptionist was drinking iced tea (peach flavour) from a tin. The theatre was shut for a month, and there was only a basic working staff.

Sit there, the receptionist said gently, and I’ll see if I can find her.

Katya’s job was to write programme notes explaining opera and ballet to school classes — including the pupils of the Collège Calvin. When she came running down the stairs from her office, she was wearing a printed summer dress of charcoal-black and white. Borges would have seen only a smudged grey blur.

I didn’t keep you waiting?

Never.

Do you want to see the stage? We can climb right up to the top, it’s very high, and then look down on the whole empty theatre.

There’s something about empty theatres. .

Yes, they are full!

We started up a metal staircase like an outdoor fire escape. Above us two or three stagehands were controlling the mechanism of the lights. She waved at them.

They invited me, she said, and I told them I’d bring you too.

They waved back at her, laughing.

Later, when we arrived at their level, one of them said to Katya: So, see you’ve got a good head for heights!

And I wondered how many times in my life I had taken part in the ritual of men showing to women the special little risks they run while working. (When the risks are large they don’t show them.) They want to impress, they want to be admired. It’s a pretext for holding the women to show them where to step or how to bend. There’s another pleasure too. The ritual exaggerates the difference between women and men and in that expanded difference there is a fluttering of hopes. For an hour or two afterwards the routine feels lighter.

How high are we?

Nearly a hundred metres, sweetie-pie.

Faintly, from some rehearsal room, we heard the trilling of a soprano warming her voice. Away from the dimmed battery of lights, everything was dark except for an open door, no larger than a hatchway, far below, at the back of the stage. Sunlight streamed through it. It had undoubtedly been opened to let in a little air. The stagehands were in shorts and vests and we were sweating.

The soprano began an aria.

Bellini’s I Puritani, the youngest stagehand announced. Eighty performances last season!

O rendetemi la speme

O lasciatemi morir. .

Let me hope again

Or let me die.

The stage was as large as a dry dock and Katya and I walked off along one of the bridges. Hanging parallel to the bridge, and descending right down to the boards of the stage, were the painted decors of the season’s repertoire.